


Up in Smoke

by swizzlesticks



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Airships, Alternate Universe, F/F, False Memories, In which Juno loses a year, M/M, Memory Loss, also political drama angst and intrigue, and Peter has No Idea how to deal with that, sky pirates you guys, this one has sky pirates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:07:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26175448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swizzlesticks/pseuds/swizzlesticks
Summary: Nureyev had a plan. A plan that did not involve Juno Steel. A plan that certainly didn't involve risking his life for him. Sometimes plans change.
Relationships: Buddy Aurinko/Vespa Ilkay, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	1. The Bottom Falls Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rabbitqueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rabbitqueen/gifts).



Juno wrinkled his nose as he woke up, becoming aware of the sensation of frigid air rushing over his face. He blinked open his good eye to see clear blue sky above him, and frowned at it, because  _ shouldn’t there be clouds there? _

Sitting up brought back some of the context to his situation. Something had exploded, likely an oxygen reserve tank. By some miracle, Juno had  _ not _ gotten thrown off the airship, but he had very much gone flying across one of the walkways, and was now sitting uncomfortably close to the edge of one of the catwalks. What’s more, judging by the distinct  _ lack _ of clouds overhead…

He checked his wrist altimeter, and sure enough, he was a few thousand feet higher than he should have been.

“Goddammit.” He would have said it with more feeling, but he was preoccupied with another thought, grabbing clumsily for the small makeshift radio at his hip. The ship shouldn’t be this far off-course, because he wasn’t piloting it, because he didn’t have to do that anymore, because Rita was here now, and she was a lot better at it than him, and she was resourceful and would have  _ found _ him by now if she was ok, but with that explosion-- “Rita?”

“Boss!” Rita’s voice came through the radio like a squawk of feedback, and Juno jerked, holding it much farther from his ear. “You’re alive! I called and called and called, and you didn’t answer, and I thought with the explosion--”

“Rita, slow down--”

“I thought for sure you’d gotten knocked off the ship, but we were at 17,000 feet, and--”

Suddenly, it all came rushing back. “Rita, what happened with the pirates?”

“That was what I was tryin to tell you, boss, we’re almost to 22,000 feet, and you don’t have any oxygen out there, and--the pirates are somewhere in the cloudbank down there, and I don’t know if we can get past them on the way back down, an’ I didn’t know if you were still out there, or if you were hurt, or  _ anything _ .” Rita’s voice was tearful. “When they shot at us, they really messed up the ship’s controls, and I couldn’t come out there to find you, and I tried anyway but the walkway to the cockpit was all busted, and--”

“Rita, it’s ok.” Juno squeezed his eye shut, willing that statement to be true. He tried to force the information he had into a scenario that didn’t end with him and Rita captured or killed by pirates, but he didn’t like any of their options. “Just--just give me a moment to think.”

God, he could use a year to come up with a plan and it probably wouldn’t do any good. He remembered now, the design emblazoned on the side of the pirate’s airship--fire around an amethyst. Which made elevation the least of their worries; the people who were hunting them were known as the  _ Rouge D’etat _ , and their name more or less said it all. They weren’t exactly pirates, they were privateers, hired by the government to make inconvenient people disappear. Literally: the state’s concealer. Juno had a pretty good guess when he'd become enough of an inconvenience to warrant their attention, but he'd been hoping it would take longer for that to catch up to him.  More importantly, now that he  _ had _ their attention, odds of survival were...slim. They had a pretty pristine success rate of assassinations, and Juno and Rita were in what basically amounted to a sky dinghy. In fact, Juno was surprised they were bothering lurking in the cloud bank waiting for them to descend again. The  _ Rouge _ definitely had the firepower to blow their ship into toothpicks, which meant…

“Hey Rita? How badly messed up are the ship’s controls?” Juno came to the section of walkway that had been destroyed, and grimaced at it, avoiding looking directly down.

“Pretty bad, Mista Steel, I can go up and down and brake, but I can’t really steer left or right or anythin’...”

“Ok. Ok, great.” It was pretty far from great, but it would have to do. He told her his plan quickly, and winced when the radio squealed with feedback when she finally stopped sputtering long enough to respond. 

“But boss, we  _ can’t _ \--!”

“Well, I’m all out of ideas, so if you’ve got a better one, I’m all ears. But either they want us dead and they’ll come out of those clouds shooting any minute, or they want us alive, and won’t have any choice but to let us go.”

“But  _ boss… _ ”

“I don’t like it either, ok? Just...give me a minute to tie myself onto something.” He headed back up the walkway without giving Rita a chance to argue about it, and tried to take stock of himself as he went. Considering he’d been standing close enough to the explosion to get thrown by it, he seemed surprisingly uninjured. His back hurt some, but he was pretty sure those were just bruises, and there seemed to be a smell of burnt hair following him, but just being singed and bruised was a shockingly ok outcome to getting shot at and blown up. If this luck held, maybe they could actually pull this off.

He wasn’t about to put any money on it, but…

He looked around for rope to tie himself to the ship, but all he could find was a length about two feet long, which wasn’t nearly enough. He tied it around a bulwark, holding on tight to the other end, which he looped around his wrist a few times. The best he could hope was that if he *did* need it to stay on the ship, it wouldn’t simply dislocate his arm.

“Ok, Rita?” He scrunched down against the bulwark, holding on as best he could. “Ready as we’re gonna get on my end.”

“Boss, I really don’t like this plan!”

“I know, Rita, me neither. I trust you, ok?” Juno searched for the right words to tell her how  _ much _ he trusted her, and how badly he hoped that at least  _ she _ got out of this ok. But he’d never been great with words, and luckily she knew that. So he just hunkered down, gripping his rope tighter. “Ready when you are.”

There was a long moment where nothing happened, and then the ship tipped. Juno squeezed his eyes shut and held on, literally, for dear life as the ship went into a nose-dive, plummeting through the air like a dropped stone. The engines were firing, but only to propel them downwards faster--the only way they were going to outrun the  _ Rouge _ was by using gravity to their advantage. The bigger ship wouldn’t be able to pull up like Juno and Rita’s little airship could, and it would take a larger ship a lot longer to change course. 

The downside, of course, was that gravity was the main cause of dying when you were starting at 22,000 feet in the air. 

Juno clung to the ship hard as air resistance tried to worm its way under him and pry him up from the walkway. He couldn’t breathe, they were moving too fast--he kept sucking in air but it didn’t feel like any of it was actually making it to his lungs. There was a roar off to his right and, startled, he opened his eyes. They were plummeting past the  _ Rouge _ , it was almost close enough that he could have reached out and touched the design on its side. But then they were past it, and there was a popping sound he couldn’t place, and then the whole walkway he’d been clinging to peeled up and off the ship, caught by a harpoon from the  _ Rouge _ . The abrupt change in direction nearly shook Juno loose, and his head slammed into the metal. He saw the rest of the ship, presumably with Rita still safe inside, vanishing into the clouds. Then white fog closed over his vision, and he didn’t remember anything more.


	2. The Mercenary

Peter Nureyev did not believe in fate, but he had a very healthy respect for cosmic irony. How else could he explain this?

On the deck of the  _ Rouge _ , Juno Steel lay unconscious. He’d been that way for some time--it had been nearly an hour since the crew had pulled the captured piece of ship onboard, with Juno tied to it. Really  _ barely _ tied, as Nureyev understood. The rope burns around the man’s left wrist notwithstanding, there hadn’t been much holding him to the bare steel catwalk.

But he was here now, and so was Nureyev, and that was...likely a problem. As a rule, Nureyev tried to avoid old flames. Doubly so old flames who he had professed his love to, triply so ones who had left in the middle of the night with no explanation. Even more so ones who were likely to blow his cover and get him killed just as he was nearing the end of this ridiculous political intrigue that he’d gotten himself embroiled with. 

Hyperion City was a mess. Nureyev had known that for longer than he’d known Juno. A year ago, the two of them had stopped a major crime lord from detonating a dirty bomb at the top of Mount Vesuvius, which loomed over the city. Juno had lost an eye in the process. Nureyev had lost something too, but not to the crime lord. Now there was a new threat, and Nureyev simply wanted out, but he couldn’t in good conscience let Ramses O’Flaherty seed nanite-coded devices through the atmosphere and destroy the last free means of transportation over the continent of Aesculus. If nothing else, destroying airship trade here would economically devastate his own homeland to the south. 

So Nureyev was once again ensnared in the bizarre dirty dealings of Hyperion City. And once again, Juno Steel had come crashing into his life. But rather than being a captive  _ with _ Juno, this time it seemed as though Nureyev was to be one of the man’s captors. The alias he was using, August Thorne, was a soldier of fortune, and not the sort of man that Nureyev could easily use to his advantage in this situation. The  _ Rouge D’etat _ was full of very  _ real _ mercenaries, and Nureyev knew better than to show weakness around people like that. The whole point of this was to get close enough to assassinate O’Flaherty, and although Nureyev hadn’t known exactly  _ who _ the  _ Rouge _ was hunting (certainly hadn’t ever imagined it would be Juno), he did know that O’Flaherty wanted their new captive alive. If he could make himself a part of the group in charge of the captive handoff, he could potentially kill two birds with one stone; quite literally, in O’Flaherty’s case. But it would also give him an excuse to free Juno without any sentimentality. Naturally they would both have to flee the  _ Rouge _ , but there would be no need to have dealings with each other beyond that. Not that Nureyev was the sort to need such idiotic things as closure, but it would be nice to be the one to walk away this time. 

He had nearly managed to convince himself that the plan had some form of elegance and simplicity to it, when Juno began to stir with a groan. It got Nureyev’s attention, but he ignored the pang in his chest and watched the man dispassionately as Juno blinked his remaining eye open and looked around him in confusion. 

The deck was nearly empty--most of the crew was busy on the comms or scanners, trying to find the other half of Juno’s ship. They didn’t need it, but the  _ Rouge _ ’s captain preferred to leave no trace. In fact, the deck was currently empty enough that the two of them could have had a conversation. So Nureyev had to blink back his surprise when Juno turned back to him like a cornered dog, drawing his knees up to his chest.

“Who are you?”

Nureyev blinked again, genuinely taken off-guard. “Pardon?”

“Who are you? Where the hell am I?” Juno twisted his arms--they were tied behind his back, and it didn’t do any good, but he fought against the ropes anyway.

Nureyev had to wait a few seconds for his mind to restart. It ground through several gears on its way back towards logic, and its first stop was at hurt. But although Juno had caused him quite a bit of pain by leaving him without a word, he’d never known the man to be intentionally  _ cruel _ . Nureyev had chalked Juno’s actions up to a lot of things since he’d last seen him, but cruelty had never been one of them. Pretending not to know Nureyev was...well, it could be a lot of things. It could be a tactic to throw off suspicion of the crew. It could be an attempt to throw Nureyev’s identity back in his face--Juno had very clearly told him he’d never wanted the gift of Nureyev’s name in the first place. 

Or...it could be genuine. 

Blood trickled from Juno’s hairline, just above his temple. Carefully, Nureyev stood from where he’d been leaning against the rail of the airship, and made his way over to Juno. The man practically snarled at him as he approached, but Nureyev put his hands up, trying to look as non-threatening as possible, glancing around to make sure none of the crew was paying too close attention. 

“Juno, I need you to be honest with me.” Nureyev kept his voice low, speaking quickly. “You...really don’t recognize me?”

“Why the hell should I?” Juno snapped. “I’ve never seen you before in my life, buddy.”

Nureyev’s mouth worked for a moment before he managed to get any sound coming out of it. “Alright. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Why should I tell you?” Juno jerked against the ropes again with a glower. “What’s wrong with my eye? What, you keep all your captives half-blindfolded? Where the hell are we, anyway?”

“You...ah.” Nureyev hesitated. So Juno was missing at least a year. And last year’s Juno had fought tooth and nail against trusting Nureyev, until he’d had no other choice. It would be better for Nureyev to just do his plan, without letting Juno in on the subterfuge; the man wasn’t likely to believe what Nureyev told him anyway, why waste time and effort adding a liability to the plan?

Nureyev knew the answer to that question, of course. Because Juno thought he was alone. And he was hurt, and he was a captive, and for all intents and purposes, he was incapacitated—a man could get used to missing an eye, but Juno had effectively just lost it all over again, because he didn’t know it was missing. What’s more, with a year or more of memory gone, he must be disoriented. And Nureyev knew he was scared, he could hear it in Juno’s transparent tough-guy act. Nureyev could pretend all he wanted that he didn’t care about Juno Steel, but something in his chest twisted at the thought of walking away without at least giving the man some straws to cling to.

“Alright.” He finally said. “Listen to me, and don’t repeat what I say. You and I know each other. From before this. You trust me.” Nureyev cringed internally at the potential lie, and the incredulity on Juno’s face, but he pushed on. “You were working with the new mayor of Hyperion City, Ramses O’Flaherty. Then you tried to kill him, and tried to escape. You just got captured by the  _ Rouge D’etat _ , they’re taking you back to O’Flaherty alive. That’s where you are now. You hit your head when they caught you, and you’re missing some memories.”

“How convenient.” Juno’s voice was sarcastic, and Nureyev offered him a thin smile.

“Not really, because I doubt you’ll take my word for any of this. But you lost your eye a year ago, fighting with me against a crime boss named Miasma.”

Juno blinked, processing that, and Nureyev swallowed as resignation chased fear and hurt across Juno’s face.

“What else do you know about me?”

Nureyev’s mind went to a place he didn’t want it to. Some combination of kissing Juno and being tortured by Miasma, a dream he’d been having almost nightly for some time now. He forced it down.

“Oh, the usual.” He said breezily instead. “You’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met, you have bad taste in clothing, and you’re hopeless with technology. Am I missing anything?”

Juno looked taken off-guard by the abrupt change in tone, but there wasn’t much Nureyev could do about it, as a voice spoke up on the deck a mere few feet away.

“He is awake, then.”

Nureyev glanced up at the big man who’d come over from somewhere near the captain’s quarters. He hadn’t managed to get the guy’s name yet, which bothered him. Usually, Nureyev made a point of having some idea who he was dealing with. This job hadn’t really lent itself to that.

“Yes, he...woke up a few minutes ago.”

“Good.” The man scooped Juno up, ignoring the smaller man’s protests, and Nureyev almost stepped forward to stop him before he caught himself. “I will take him to medical, and then down to the cells. In the meantime, the captain would like to see you.”

Nureyev’s eyes flicked to Juno’s face, and the fear he could pick out in Juno’s good eye was like a bell being struck in his chest. But there wasn’t a single thing Nureyev could do about it. Not now. He’d just have to hope that what he’d told Juno would be enough for the time being.

So he squared his shoulders like the mercenary he was pretending to be, and turned away. But even as he walked towards the captain’s cabin, his ears tracked Juno across the deck, and down the ramp that led to all the inner workings of the ship.


End file.
